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This story was originally published in the Sept. 02, 2014 edition of the Courier & Press.

An empty blue lounge chair at the water’s edge.

“I will never forget that sight,” said Sarah Teague.

More than a memory, it’s a stark reminder of the emptiness and unanswered questions left behind by the unsolved disappearance of her daughter Heather Teague 19 years ago.

Later, she would lay in the spot on the Ohio River bank where Heather’s chair had been and contemplate what, if anything, others in the area could have seen.

It’s just one of the many questions Sarah Teague said she still has about Heather’s disappearance.

Heather Teague, 23, disappeared Aug. 26, 1995, while sunbathing on Newburgh Beach in Henderson County across the Ohio River from Newburgh. A Newburgh man told police he was looking at the beach across the river through a telescope and saw Heather being dragged away by a shirtless, bushy-haired man with a beard and a gun.

Five days later the Henderson County man considered a suspect by police, Marty Dill, committed suicide when law enforcement officials attempted to serve a search warrant at his rural home. Dill was linked to the abduction by his description and his ownership of a red-and-white Ford Bronco seen next to Heather’s car on the road to the beach the day she disappeared. Heather was never found.

While state police have kept Heather’s case alive, even including it on a deck of playing cards representing unsolved cases in 2012, Sarah Teague has been relentless.

“I haven’t been able to do much else for 19 years,” she said.

The parade of people knocking on her door with information, calling her, writing her, anonymously dropping enigmatic tidbits on the Internet has been constant since the beginning.

More often than not these leads have been speculative and contradictory, based on rumors and overheard bar stool revelations: Heather was shot, raped, hit by a car, buried alive in a well; her body fed to hogs, hidden under a porch, dropped into the nearby Green River, even that she was sold into slavery and still alive.

“You wouldn’t believe the leads we got,” she said.

Sarah Teague has chased every lead. It’s led her to hire private investigators and psychics, testify to a grand jury, direct a re-enactment of the abduction, write letters to a suspected serial killer in prison, bring in search dogs years after the fact and consult with missing person organizations.

“I’ve dug in wells myself looking for her,” she said.

She has looked for clues in a lot of unlikely places. The creepiest had to be the dank basement of an abandoned house where the bones she found in a corner later turned out to be a goat’s.

But it’s the conspiracy tips that really get to her.

In May 2012, someone posted on the Internet message board Topix that Heather’s body would never be found, her disappearance connected to an underground pornography and drug trafficking ring.

“Isn’t it cruel?” she said.

Apart from not knowing what happened to Heather, one other question about the investigation haunts Sarah Teague the most.

It began with a picture of Dill which she said was given to her by Dill’s mother and purportedly taken in July 1995, nearly a month before Heather’s abduction.

It shows Dill with a cleanly shaven head and face, a clear contrast from the composite sketches of the man seen dragging Heather off the beach.

Sarah Teague believes the witness sketch was prepared from Dill’s drivers license picture, which she said she first saw published with a news story about six weeks after the abduction.

She is also struck by the eerie similarity between a full body sketch of Heather’s abductor and a photograph of another man identified as a possible suspect in 2004. Former Henderson County resident Christopher Below is imprisoned in Ohio on a manslaughter charge for the death of his girlfriend, whose body also was never found, and has refused to answer any questions about Heather’s case.

“Nineteen years later, I still have the same question that I had six weeks after she was abducted,” Sarah Teague said.

Trooper Corey King, spokesman for Kentucky State Police Post 16 at Henderson, said police stand by the composite sketches.

“That was based on a witness account,” he said.

Push for answers

Sarah Teague’s constant push for answers has kept Heather’s case alive in the news media and on countless Internet blogs and message boards.

Along the way she has ruffled the feathers of more than a few investigators and others close to the case with her persistence and led Dill’s wife to accuse her of harassment.

This culminated in February 2013 when, representing herself, she filed a handwritten lawsuit in federal court charging malfeasance on the part of Kentucky State Police and others involved in Heather’s case. In it, Sarah Teague alleged that officials had bungled the investigation and not told her the truth about Heather’s abduction.

A judge dismissed the lawsuit in May 2013 because law enforcement had no foreknowledge that Heather was in danger, there was no violation of constitutional rights, and also because malfeasance in office is a crime in Kentucky and the court had no power to order criminal charges filed against anybody.

Trooper Corey King, spokesman for Kentucky State Police Post 16 in Henderson, said police remain committed to solving Heather’s and other unsolved cases.

“Nothing truly goes cold. We have to review them every three months and submit a report,” he said. “What has changed is really that we have had a turnover in the detectives at the post.”

King said the increased interest in unsolved cases has led to solving two other cold cases.

“They are on a roll, and we are taking on this case now,” he said.

Many of the avenues being explored by investigators are based on new ideas about old evidence and information in the case. Although this work hasn’t turned up anything yet, state police recently excavated some retention basins in a livestock operation on John Steele Road in Henderson county and a cistern at an undisclosed location south of Henderson.

King said state police still hope to provide Sarah Teague with some answers.

“The frustration of losing a child, there’s probably nothing much worse than that, and we get that. We want to solve it as bad as she is wanting answers,” King said.

Dreams

Heather Teague was an honors student, homecoming queen and cheerleader at Webster County High School, where she also played basketball and ran track.

Mother and daughter had agreed it was time to make some changes in their lives. Heather was attending college at Western Kentucky University.

“I was going to be a registered nurse,” Sarah Teague said. “She was going to be a psychologist, probably.”

Neither of their dreams came to be. Instead, somewhere along the way Heather got lost.

“She was dating a guy who was almost 20 years older. She had gotten into drugs, some things she didn’t know how to get out of,” Sarah Teague said.

Heather, who wrote poetry, left behind journals and notes filled with obscure, haphazardly scrawled poems and observations. One of them is a page torn from a notebook and filled with poetry. It is written in tiny cursive except for a single sentence: “I LOVED YOU ALL!”

On the Thursday before Heather disappeared, Sarah Teague came home to find her daughter asleep on her couch. She had been fired from her summer job and had no where to go.

That evening, Sarah Teague stood in her driveway and leaned into the car window to speak to her daughter as she prepared to leave.

“I said, ‘Heather why are you so angry?’” Sarah Teague said. “She said, ‘I wish I knew,’ and those words still haunt me to this day.”

However, it wasn’t the last time she would hear Heather’s voice, she said. Heather’s last communication to her mother came in the form of a message on her telephone answering machine.

“I’ve got one little tape. You can hear a Bob Seger song playing. She talks about a dream she had. The sun was shining down on a dirt road, and then suddenly she just knew she wasn’t there anymore,” Sarah Teague said.